When we talked about Ratatouille, the first that it comes to mind is eggplant. An eggplant like we said naturally has a lot of bitterness when still in its roast state. There’s a couple of ways we’re going to work to get that out. The first thing, I’m going to shrimp up this eggplant just a bit. I’d say I’m going to peel it completely. And we’re going to talk about what it takes to get the bitterness out.
Then when I make the cuts, it looks straight down. You really don’t want to take a lot of fruit away. I just want to take the skin off. So, I start with the nice sharp knife and I’m going to look straight down that eggplant and mix it on my knife and I’m not cutting too deep. I just want to get that skin off. So, as I make each turn—as I complete each cut, it gives a little bit of a turn. Let’s off in the top again and come all the way down, like so. So, I get the eggplant peel.
The next step, I’m going to slice it in half right down the center, okay. And for that point, I’ll make my cuts like this here. It’s about maybe coral inch, half inch. So, I’m going to take my eggplant slices, I’m going to slice for Ratatouille. We’ll cut the pieces as far about dice. The key with the knife is to always—if I can always see my fingers in the knife at the same time, I won’t get cut. But if I’ve been cut, don’t cut yourself. I’ve come myself a couple of times.
Now, okay that’s about the size of the eggplant that I’m looking for. Now, once we’ve gone dicing to these cubes, the next would be you want to get that bitterness out. So one way is to soak it, soak it—I won’t go as far as they called it brim, but it is soak water. For a quarter of water, it probably about two teaspoon of salt and the salt will soak in to the eggplant and it will draw out some of the water that holds the bitterness and since I had the eggplant. Now once you want to let it soak for a minimum of half and an hour. Once you’ve soak it for an half, you want to get all the water as much as the water as possible often. We got to strain in off like so. I’m going to give a little squeeze to kind of help it along. Okay, that’s good.
The Ratatouille that I’m going to make today, I’ve done a couple of things a little bit differently. You know I really like to cook with sautéed. I don’t particular care to give a whole sautéed in my mouth at once. But and sautéed work really nice if you start with them with the garlic and the onions, and the olive oil that dissolve in to the oil and they really come out a nice flavor through whatever gets cook after that. And I’m also going to work—this is some pancetta. We’re just always put some pancetta to that. Pancetta is Italian bacon. It’s cut from the same part of the animal that you get bacon from. This is a really nice pancetta. It’s very a lot linear that bacon.
And this one is probably a little linear that I really expected. So, we’re going to add touch of olive oil. But a lot times you see the pancetta, if you have enough fat on there, it’s really all you need. Just start with the pancetta, render that fat then you can soak it every thing else right on top of that. But for today, we’re going to start off with a little bit of olive oil, since my pancetta is so lean. I would say it is about a tablespoon there, okay.
Now well, this is getting ready. I’m going to steam 450 over here. One of the things that going to make this Ratatouille a little bit different is I’m going to roast the peppers, okay. So, I’ve got one eggplant so far and I’m going to take one green pepper, one red pepper. And now, I’m going to roast jalapeno. That would be in the oven and what I’m going to do first is I’m going to add my pancetta probably about let’s say its a quarter cup right there, okay.
I really like the pancetta. There’s a certain flavor that we don’t have too many products in United States, before products. In Europe, the prosciutto and the pancetta, the sausages, it’s earthly kind of aroma in a flavor. It’s hard to come by a lot of times, the products in our supermarket. My grandfather used to make a proscuitto on the basement and I grew up with that taste of that flavor. I tried to work in as much as my cooking as possible as much as for my grandparents.
Okay now, once you we render the fat from the pancetta, you can see it drying a little bit. We’re going to go ahead. I’m going to put three anchovies, the anchovies for lays into the pan with the pancetta and the olive oil. It’s always a very salty. And once the salt in the hot oil have a chance to mix up within sautéed, they’re going to fall apart right into the mix, okay. So when I see that on my sautéed, it kind of curled up a bit and so on it dried out a little from the cooking in the olive oil. I’m going to add about two spoon of garlic on top of that.
Now the next step, I’m going to wait. I’m going to wait so I can smell that garlic. And as soon as I get smell, I also want to have the aroma from the garlic, we’re going to add, this is one medium onion, small diced, okay. I’m going to put that right in there, on top of the garlic and sautéed olive oil and pancetta. Now for this dish for time, I want to slow it down. I’m going to sautéed this on a medium low heat and just give it some time to kind of come together. I really want to let that flavors. The trick of Ratatouille, the key of Ratatouille, with all these different flavors to melt together, that’s why this one of those dishes it will taste better the next day type of thing.
And also I want to cook it, I’ll give it time. Let the flavors come out. I’ll normalize what I have here in my frying pan. Bring out more of the sugars and the onion to add more to that flavor, so the one way to add flavor is, and that’s the reason why I’ve roast the peppers. Now in roasting peppers, they will concentrate the flavor. The sweetness of the pepper will concentrate. We have the ability to remove the water. The water of the vessel comes out into the oven, not into my frying pan. So when I go to the frying pan, I’m going to get all that sweet flavors oppose of having to cook all that water out.
Now, once the peppers have roasted, once they’ve roasted in the oven for by half and hour, they’ll turn very black and the skin will blister away from the fruit. And once they’ve come out, I placed them in a bowl and I covered that with another dish and that’s it, and cool for probably another 20 minutes. Now, once that time has elapsed, then what we have is roasted peppers here. You see that, there are the jalapenos. I didn’t put in the other pan.
Now, once the peppers are roasted, I’m going to cool it. I’m going to place it on my cutting board. I’m going to make a cut through the pepper. I want to open it up because the next think I want to do is take out the stem like this. I want to get the seeds also. As much as possible, we’re going to take those seeds out. Let do this one also. They’re really softened up. I want it cool. They’re easy to handle. It’s going to take seeds right out the stem. I got my seeds and stems removed from the peppers. I’m going to turn them skin side up now and the skins come off very easily if I’ve allowed it blister in the oven correctly. So, I’m just going to take it off like so.
Today, I’m using red and green peppers, but you see the orange and yellow once are stored beautiful and they are nice of distance with this all.
Okay, once I’ve got this pepper peeled, I’m going put jalapenos in this one, but I promise I didn’t fill them in the other one for you all right. So this recipe would be one of these peppers, one red, one green and one jalapeno. We’re going to cut them the same size as we cut the eggplants, about a quarter inch. Again, remember the key is to be able to see the knife and your fingers at all times. If you can see the knife in your fingers all time, you’ll not let your right hand cut the left hand with the knife.
Once my onions have become translucent over here, we’re going to add eggplants. Now, to move other onions to side of the frying pan here, I’m going to add the eggplant to other half of the pan. Eggplant has a tendency also to act like a sponge and when you cook with eggplant, you should plan of using a fair amount of olive oil. And if it’s bit olive oil, you can cover the nice dish later. Remember that when we end with later is really what we put in the first place. Some people think they can cut corners, but if you get a cut corners, it’s going to taste like it later.
So, I’m just going to add this to touch more of olive oil into this pan here. Well that sautéing, we’re going to take—I have some fresh oregano right here. Okay, now when I pull the leaves off the original base, they just hold the stem on my hand, I pull against the grime and I got the leaves that way and you pull this way. You have a tense to take a lot of the stem. Again, I’m just going to hold that stem and I’m going to pull down the stem to get those leaves off.
Now, I’ve got my bunch of regular leaves here and I’m just going to run the knife to cut it very fine. I’m going to one direction then I will just turn those leaves in the other way. Okay, just to get a really kind of a fine rough chop. Now, over here, I want to see my eggplant wreck down. It’s going to be a few minutes. Again this time, you see my eggplant starting to wreck a little bit, just going to crack down. And what we’re going to do is I’m going to have one cup of chicken stack. Let’s put about three quarters, okay. Now bring it to another bowl. I’m going to add my peppers back into the plot. I’m going to add my first oregano here. We’re also going to add a four finger pinch salt and a three finger pinch of black pepper. So that’s my grandma told me that. You’ll pinch on this, you’ll pinch on that.
Okay, so the next step now. I’m going to add some potato product in here. We’re going to add about half of cup, maybe a little bit better than half of cup. I’m going to add a little bit to this. I want to combine all my ingredients in the pan. I want to bring them all together into the liquid that I’m putting in here. So, I’m going to add this with just a bit more of the tomato sauce.
Now, we’re going to bring this to a simmer. I’m going to simmer for at least 20 minutes. I want to really thicken up. I want the eggplants to really soak up the chicken stack and the tomatoes and I want the fresh herbs to infuse into the other liquids so we will all come together into a nice Ratatouille or vegetable stew.
I’m going to turn the heat down, really low. This was it on the stove. You see there’s a lot of liquid in here, so I don’t want to put a cover on it yet, maybe in a bit. You know when you put a lean on it. The liquids were all stay in there. But with the lean on it, we’ll be able to cook some of the stuff out.
Now, serving a Ratatouille, there’s a million different ways to serve it. I’ve seen in news before for breakfast as a feeling predominant, which was wonderful. It had a million times served hot as a vegetable dish as served on a tray. But I really like in the summer time when I make it the day ahead, I’ll let stay overnight in my refrigerator and the next day, we serve it as an appetizer or kind of like a top of nut for some bread.
So today, we’re going to serve it as we would do as family style or maybe as an appetizer. What I’m going to do, we’re going to take some of this red leaf lettuce. We’re going to place some lettuce leaves. And it’s as simple as just we’re going to spoon this Ratatouille right inside of the plate. And then, I’ve got some piece of breads that I’ve got into small wedges which we’re going to put place that right around on one side of this Ratatouille. We’re going to put our little bread chips. You can see crackles or slice Italian bread is really nice. Garlic bread, if you want something else that would be nice, crackers. We’re going to add some edible flowers here. We’re going to put this right over here and here we are.
